Awaiting PNC’s payback & Wolf’s ‘transparency’

Awaiting PNC’s payback & Wolf’s ‘transparency’

There’s a
curious little nugget
in a Post-Gazette story about PNC Financial Services Group now being flush with
cash. Or flusher than it typically has been, that is.

The banking
giant recently shed its stake in Blackrock Inc., a behemoth money manager. The
sales price was $14.4 billion. That’s “billion” with a behemoth “B.”
After taxes, PNC’s take is expected to be about $11 billion. It wasn’t a bad
day at the transaction window.

PNC more
than intimates that, post-coronavirus pandemic, it might just be in acquisition
mode.

First off, however,
it might be more than a nice gesture for PNC to pay back the public the $48
million in public subsidies it accepted to build a new skyscraper in
Pittsburgh’s Golden Triangle a decade-plus ago.

PNC was
flush with cash then, too. It could have paid for the new office building
itself. Or, if it didn’t have enough petty cash around, it could have – and should
have — gotten a loan from itself.

You can
almost hear the loan officer now: “We’ll need two months of bank statements,
checking and savings and, oh, yes, the driver’s licenses and W2s of
every employee. Oh, never mind – we have all that on file.”

Ahem.

Be that as
it may, one of the many banking targets that might be in PNC’s viewfinder,
reportedly, is none other than Pittsburgh’s own FNB Corp., aka First National
Bank.

Now, that’s
the very same FNB that is the signed, sealed and delivered primary tenant in-waiting
to anchor a new skyscraper in the Pittsburgh Penguins’ billion-dollar
redevelopment of the former Civic Arena site.

So, what
happens to that deal if PNC subsumes rising competitor FNB?

Those web
spinners along the
swampy banks of the Susquehanna River in Harrisburg just keep spinning away.

Spotlight PA
reports that as the heat intensified for the administration of Gov. Tom Wolf to
shine more sunlight on the much-derided waiver process that allowed – or denied
– businesses to operate during the coronavirus pandemic, Wolf himself sent
emails to business that had applied for waivers warning that third parties were
seeking private information.

Ah, that
would be those dastardly third parties seeking to inform the public of the
public’s business that their government has worked overtime to hide.

From the
email bearing the governor’s signature, which went to every one of the 43,000
waiver applicants, according to the reporting consortium:

“In many cases, these
requests include information that appear to be proprietary or even personal. Nevertheless,
various entities … continue to press the administration to disclose this information.”

It mirrors the rationale
Wolf used when he refused to comply with a state Senate subpoena seeking the
same transparency, Spotlight PA reminds.

But as the reporting
consortium further notes, personal and/or proprietary information is redacted under
the state public records act.

Nonetheless, the state
Department of Community and Economic Development (DCED), which oversaw the
waiver program, attempted to frame the emails as a caution to applicants to
protect their privacy.

That’s a stretch.

If the governor is ignorant of the
redaction fact, that’s one problem. But if he’s not and was purposely
misrepresenting the situation, that’s quite another.

And to what end? Was it an attempt to
tamp down waiver requests? Was it an attempt to somehow leverage the business
community to lash out at media? To somehow shame media?

And this revelation fast on the heels
that, just prior to the Wolf administration releasing a list of those granted
waivers, some waiver recipients were, without explanation, stripped of the
government’s blessing to operate. Their initial waivers were scrubbed from any
listing the public had demanded. That’s called “a slick government trick.”

Prosecution of sound public policy
demands transparency. The game-playing in which the Wolf administration appears
to have engaged fails to meet that standard.

Colin McNickle is
communications and marketing director at the Allegheny Institute for Public
Policy (cmcnickle@alleghenyinstitute.org).